Study finds children keep moms up at night—but not dads

Women with children are more likely to be sleep deprived than women without kids. Men slept the same whether they had kids or not.

Women with children are more likely to be sleep deprived than women without kids. Men slept the same whether they had kids or not.

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Study finds children keep moms up at night—but not dads

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I have just come out the other side of my second child’s first year. She is now, thankfully, sleeping through the night. But for a long (long) time there, she wasn’t and my sleep was often punctuated by bouts of her crying in the middle of the night. Yet even though her room is closer to my husband’s side of the bed, he could somehow sleep right through her squeals and cries, leaving me to stare at him in astonishment, wondering, “Can’t you hear that?!”

Now a new study shows that I am not alone: women with children living at home are more likely to be sleep-deprived and report feeling tired than women with no children. That alone, perhaps, is not much of a surprise. More interesting is that researchers found no such kid-induced sleep deprivation in men.

The study, from the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University, analyzed data from a nationwide telephone survey of nearly 6,000 men and women. The respondents reported how long they slept each night, with less than six hours considered sleep-deprived. The respondents also told researchers how many days they had felt tired in the past month.

Nearly 3,000 of the respondents were women 45 and younger and among this group the only factor linked with insufficient sleep was having children. Just under half the women with children reported getting at least seven hours of sleep, compared to 62 percent of women without children. In addition, women with children reported feeling tired 14 days a month, three days more than their child-free counterparts. Also, each child in the house increased the odds of sleep deprivation by 50 percent, study leader Kelly Sullivan told the Chicago Tribune. Exercise, marital status and education level had no impact on women’s sleep or on how often they felt tired, though women who didn’t work and had higher household income were more likely to get more sleep.

Yet Sullivan saw a much different result when looking at what led to male respondents’ sleepless nights. “For men, we did basically the same analysis and children had absolutely no impact on men [and their sleep],” she told the Tribune. Instead, men 45 and younger were less likely to get enough sleep if they had less than a high school-level education.

One sleep expert told the Tribune that, in order to even the playing field, one parent can take on morning responsibilities and the other night-time child care. And that is more or less what happened at our house. I may have pulled more night-time detail in the last year or so, but our six-year-old son already knows to go to his dad’s side of the bed when he wants his breakfast made in the morning. It’s an arrangement that allows them to spend some quality time before work and school, and me to get an extra 30 minutes of much-needed shut-eye.

Emily Landes has a six-year-old, a toddler and a pretty severe sleep deficit.